TWELFTH PARISH SYMPOSIUM 2014: ABSTRACTS
Battles in the Belfry: The Late Medieval Bell Dispute at Wymondham Abbey
Kristi W. Bain (Northwestern University)
In 1409, the Prior of Wymondham, Norfolk, petitioned the king’s bench for intervention in a
dispute with parishioners who earlier that year had trapped him in his chambers after he had
confiscated their church bells. Parishioners justified their actions by claiming that, without
their bells and a proper belfry, the faithful were missing mass and their children were dying
unbaptized. Legal proceedings continued for almost two years as parishioners fought for their
bells and bell tower through violence, petitions, and litigation. Ultimately, the priory not only
returned the parishioners’ bells to their small belfry but also granted them a license to build a
newer and taller tower, with only minor fines for the damage their riots caused. Medieval and
post-medieval sources evince that through this and other similar conflicts, medieval parish
communities gained more control over the fabric of their churches, particularly over their
belfries. Moreover, the two towers of Wymondham’s parish church, one belonging to the
monks, the other to the parishioners, still dominate the town’s landscape and, together with
local histories, have anchored the modern parish community in its turbulent medieval past.
Drawing on findings gathered from two years of archival and ethnographic research in
Wymondham, this paper will examine the rich complexities of grassroots religious life in the
late medieval parish. Moreover, I will demonstrate how this dispute and the resulting two bell
towers at Wymondham gave parishioners an enduring collective identity. In particular, the
great lengths to which parishioners went to secure rights over their bells and belfry reveal the
integral role a peal of bells played in parish life and identity. More broadly, this paper will
show how modern imaginings of the religious past are fundamental to how England’s
communities perceive their medieval legacy, modern mission, and the value of medieval
church buildings that remain as the center of community life.
Context, comment and outlook
John Harper (University of Bangor)
In this final session, John Harper will set out to place the soundscape in the wider context of
visual, sensory and emotional experience, and to distinguish the experence of different groups
in different parts of the church. He will also bring together some of the themes explored
during the day, and reflect on possibilities for future study and investigation.
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The remarkable soundscape of the pilgrimage church of Wezemaal (Brabant, Belgium)
in the 15th and 16th centuries
Bart Minnen, PhD
Wezemaal is a medium sized village in Belgium, near the town of Leuven. Since 1234 the
pastoral care of the St Martin’s parish lay in the hands of three regular canons of the
Norbertine abbey of Averbode. During the 15th century, the church became the most
important pilgrimage place of St Job in the Low Countries. As St Job was also the saint
patron of musicians in those days, it is not surprising that much attention was paid to the
musical framework of his devotion. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the worship of St Job
became surrounded by a remarkable soundscape that surpassed by far that of a simple village
church.
The sounds themselves we cannot bring to life again. But thanks to the rich sources
that survived, both written and iconographic, it is possible to uncover the various elements of
which this soundscape was composed.
Each year, around the 10th of May, the feast of St Job, the church was crowded by
people of all ranks, praying, singing, begging for healing, bringing gifts and buying
souvenirs. Besides the three Norbertine priests, the church fabric allowed many secular
priests to provide religious services. Companies of musicians established in the nearby towns
of Leuven or Mechelen not only accompanied the processions and the mystery play of St Job,
but also played music inside the church. The instruments they handled can still be recognized
on the pilgrim badges of Wezemaal, showing St Job rewarding three musicians who try to
comfort him with their music.
In 1514, when the pilgrimage reached its peak, a choir of nine priests was established
in the church, accompanied by six choristers who were tonsured and dressed in a red tabard.
The choir regulations are preserved, so we know what they sung and what payments they
received.
Refusing to accept the new reality after 1520, when the devotion to St Job suddenly
collapsed, the church kept on trying to attract pilgrims. In 1563 a carillon was assembled out
of no less than fourteen bells, six of which came from the French town of St Quentin after its
capture by the Spaniards in 1559.
This marvelous soundscape fell silent when the church was burned down in 1579
amidst the darkest years of the Eighty Year’s War. Its memory lived on for a while, but the
reconstructed vaults after 1600 would never again echo the rich sounds from the past.
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English Catholic Soundscapes: The case of Little Crosby, 1580-1640
Emilie K. M. Murphy (York)
What did it sound like to be a Catholic in early modern England? This paper will begin to
answer this question by focussing on the village of Little Crosby in the parish of Sefton, a
few miles north of Liverpool. The soundscape of this uniquely Catholic village, like the
majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of
ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a “Protestant”
phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively
Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. If the dominant scholarship is to be
accepted, ballads were about Catholics, not by them. Yet this paper will reveal how Catholics
utilised ballads to voice social, devotional and political concerns by focussing on the music
preserved in two manuscript collections: the Blundell family commonplace book, the Great
Hodge Podge, and a hitherto anonymous manuscript collection preserved in the British
Library, Additional MS. 15,225.
This paper will reveal how it was through sounds that English Catholics forged their
individual and communal identities during this period. The ballads performed in Little
Crosby reveal a festive, communal and vibrant Catholic community, within which musical
expression was fundamental. Performance of the music within the manuscripts served to
widen the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This paper will
also reveal the way that Catholics used sounds to voice religious politics, as several pieces
were pointedly subversive and demonstrate that music enabled Catholics to exhort protest as
much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the
manuscripts, this paper will reveal how priests serving the Catholic network facilitated by the
Blundells through Little Crosby, used ballads as part of their missionary strategy to
evangelise the beleaguered English Catholic laity.
Consistory court cacophony: What their records can contribute to our knowledge of the
17thC soundscape
Andrew Thomson (Winchester)
Surviving consistory court books offer one of the best ‘soundtracks’, albeit from a ‘criminal’
perspective, of the common people and the noises they made in Early Modern England.
Surprisingly there are relatively few studies of consistory court operations covering the whole
of the seventeenth century. This ‘paper’, based on on-going research over three dioceses of
the Southern Province, will focus on graphic examples, from the court books, of parochial
behaviour and the impact they made on the seventeenth century ‘soundscape’.
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Here and there, before and after: some thoughts on parish music in England and
France, 1400-1700
Magnus Williamson (Newcastle)
In histories of the parish soundscape the field of investigation tends to be demarcated
geographically by the English channel and chronologically by the religious upheavals of the
mid-sixteenth century. Without pretending to offer helpful answers or a coherent
methodology, this paper will investigate some (dis)continuities between the pre- and the postReformation musician, from the clericulus to the west gallery musician; and some
(dis)similarities between English and French experiences.
Music in the post-reformation English parish church: a theme and variations
Jonathan Willis (Birmingham)
The prevailing sense of parish church music in the decades following the Elizabethan
Settlement of Religion is (more or less) of an abrupt decrescendo, followed by a deafening
silence. The splendours of the English musical renaissance – Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons – were
the exceptions that proved the general rule, and the enchanting sounds of the Elizabethan
cathedrals and chapels royal were literally a world apart from the monotonous droning of the
tone-deaf congregations of the urban and rural English parish. This view is of a kind with a
broader sense that English Protestantism – and particularly Puritanism – were inimically
hostile to the arts: visual, dramatic, mimetic, literary and musical. The 1580s, we have been
told many times, marked a ‘cultural watershed’, a ‘second reformation’, a transition from
‘iconoclasm’ to ‘iconophobia’. According to this schema, affection for the sorts of cultural
artefacts mentioned is frequently taken by historians to signify either the presence of
backward-looking, conservative, ‘traditional’ (read: crypto-Catholic) sympathies or,
conversely, an innovatory, destabilising and ‘proto-’ avant-garde conformism (Laudianism’s
‘parochial roots’).
This paper will explore the fate of music in the post-reformation English Church through a
series of parochial case studies. It will suggest that taking the local context seriously
problematizes some of the grand narratives mentioned above. Post-reformation musical
provision was not simply a barometer of parochial religious feeling: it was also a reflection of
social, economic, political and cultural concerns. And insofar as the music of the parish
church was in part conditioned by religious belief, the relationship between the two was far
more complex than the quadrilateral of conservative/conformist/Puritan/proto-Laudian
suggests. The success of the Elizabethan settlement in part lay in the fact that it allowed for a
surprising amount of community control, and therefore local variation, in certain aspects of
religious worship, of which music was perhaps the most prominent. This success, however,
was built on a foundation of institutionalised instability. Paradoxically, it was only when this
instability was removed in the first part of the seventeenth century that the whole elaborate
edifice came crashing to the ground.